Denzil Hurley’s Monochromes-on-a-Stick: Corn-dog Reinhardts?

THE DAILY PIC (#1641): I’m a great lover of fine abstraction – and have almost no interest in 99% of the abstraction made today. But in Denzil Hurley’s show at Canada gallery in New York, the simple addition of a stick at the bottom of some of his monochromes seems to give them a whole new force.

As prototype placards, they become instant placeholders for the political, and a reminder that abstraction has always involved politics of one kind or another.

In their blankness, they also invoke how hopeless and empty politics can seem.

But they also have something faintly comic about them – a cartoonist’s thought bubbles held aloft on a stick. Ad Reinhardt, history’s only cartooning monochromist, might have approved.